SOURCE: Gabin, Jane S. “The Centennial Cantata.” In A Living Minstrelsy, pp. 89-104. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985.

[In the following excerpt, Gabin retraces both the negative critical reaction and the positive public response to Lanier's Centennial Meditation of Columbia, demonstrating that the verses read alone, without the musical accompaniment, warrant much of the negative critique.]

In Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, seventy-five acres of frozen ground were being prepared for the construction of almost two hundred buildings, statues, and fountains. The land had been leveled, drained, marked into streets, and planted with utility poles since the end of 1873, but three years later only five half-finished buildings and a lot of mud were to be found on the site.¹ However, within five months, a special railroad line would link the city's center to the main entrance of the Centennial exhibition area, where broad avenues would lead hundreds of thousands of American and foreign visitors past Machinery Hall, the Women's Pavilion, Horticultural Hall, and scores of buildings representing the people and crafts of dozens of countries.

But the fair was, foremost, a showplace for America. It was the Gilded Industrial Age, and the people came to view their accomplishments, proudly strolling the park's Avenue of the Republic, past the displays of engines, model factories, a section of cable from the Brooklyn Bridge, and the telephone. For a time, at least for the six months' duration of the fair, the glories of the machine age eclipsed its abuses. What mattered most of all was that the displays were products of a united nation; at Fairmount Park, the ruling spirit was that of reconciliation.

Recognition of this spirit was also important to the fair's organizers, who, in planning the opening-day ceremonies, consciously awarded the commissions for a cantata to a Northerner and a Southerner, so that the composition itself would serve as a symbol of rededication to the Union. Lanier, who was by nature pacific and forgiving, was quick to realize the importance of the cantata's symbolism. Several days after receiving the commission, he wrote to Bayard Taylor that since the piece was to be performed “not only at our Centennial, but at a festival where the world was our invited guest, to be welcomed … spread-eagleism would be ungraceful and unworthy.” He also formulated an aesthetic principle by which to write the words of the cantata; since “something ought to be said in the poem … it ought to be not rhymed philosophy, but a genuine song, and lyric outburst.”²

In a 5 January letter, Dudley Buck told Lanier that he needed the text by 15 January and provided some guidelines. Buck and Thomas thought the cantata should have “three movements or rather one continuous movement including three episodes.”³ Buck hoped Lanier would use irregular verse, which presented no difficulty since Lanier was now doing his best work in that idiom.

But Lanier was preoccupied by his work at the Peabody, preparing a concert of Scandinavian music, as well as writing another sketch of India for Lippincott's, and 8 January found the cantata assignment untouched. Yet the pleasures of his musical work relieved much of the pressure now placed upon him. “In music,” he wrote to Mary, “one finds an immense compensation for all the necessary repressions which come in daily life. … I find it growing more and more necessary to me. What will I ever do without the Orchestra?”⁴ Perhaps Lanier had received inspiration from the lyricism of the pieces played that night; the concert included the Prelude to Act IV of Hamerik's opera, Tovelille, and the Norse Symphony by one of Lanier's favorites, Niels Gade. Whatever the source of inspiration, it worked; he completed the poem, at least its first draft, the next day.

Rewriting, revising, and alteration were accomplished, and on 12 January, Lanier sent Taylor another version. He included an “analysis of movements written in the margin.”⁵ He also showed the poem to Theodore Thomas, who had come to Baltimore with his orchestra for two concerts, and who was in charge of the musical program at the Centennial opening exercises; the maestro seemed quite pleased with Lanier's work.

As a musician, Lanier understood that this poem presented unique problems and realized that he “had to compose for the musician as well as the country: and had to cast the poem into such a form as would at once show well in music … and in poetry.” He wished to make it “as large and simple as a Symphony of Beethoven's,” and to this end he had to think in terms of “a kind of average and miscellaneousness” and “in broad bands of color.”⁶ This was a concept that did not lend itself to simple explanation. As Lanier wrote the words, he continually thought of music; music suggested words to him, and these words, in turn, had to suggest notes to Buck. “I have had constantly in my mind,” wrote Lanier, “those immortal melodies of Beethoven in which, with little more than the chords of the tonic and dominant, he has presented such firm, majestic, and at the same artless ideas.”⁷ To Lanier, the term “artless,” which he used several times in his letters to Taylor and Buck, meant lacking in artifice. He wanted to present concepts as strong, free, and straightforward as the nation whose ideals they expressed. He was not interested in writing anything esoteric, too intellectual, or even “too original.”⁸ Yet, by reason of its composition according to musical concepts, the poem was quite original, and therefore provoked a range of response from admiration to open hostility.

From the first, Dudley Buck was both an enthusiastic and a sympathetic collaborator. He wrote to Lanier that he was pleased “to join partnership with a Southerner on this truly national occasion. … As I am so fortunate as to have a musician for my poet we shall doubtless understand each other.”⁹ Although the two men did not meet until the day of the cantata's performance, they found themselves to be quite compatible.

Born in Hartford in 1839, Dudley Buck graduated from Trinity College and went to Europe for the obligatory music studies. Upon returning to America, he established his reputation as a virtuoso organist, and by 1876 he was a popular composer of religious music. While in Chicago serving as organist of St. James' Episcopal Church, he suffered a devastating setback when he lost his library, including many compositions, in the Great Fire of 1871. He sought a fresh start in Boston, where he met Theordore Thomas; he became Thomas's assistant in 1875 and followed him to New York. Buck became organist and conductor of the Brooklyn Apollo Club, a position he would hold for a quarter-century. The Centennial commission established his status as a composer of s; in subsequent years he wrote Scenes from the Golden Legend and King Olaf's Christmas, both based upon works by Longfellow, and The Voyage of Columbus, taken from the Life of Columbus by Washington Irving.¹⁰ These s are neglected today, if not unknown, but many of Buck's hymns are still popular.

Although Lanier wrote the poem for the cantata in a “frenzy of Creation,” he spent several weeks at constant revision, often at the urging of Buck, with whom he now had “quite a voluminous correspondence.”¹¹ They wrote almost every day—Buck making suggestions about Lanier's words with respect to their effect when pronounced by a chorus, and Lanier responding favorably to Buck's notes. Lanier had originally titled his work the Centennial Song of Columbia until Buck had asked him if this was really the most appropriate title. “The word ‘Song’ seems to me hardly worthy of the calibre of the poem. … It occurred to me that perhaps, on second thoughts, you might prefer Centennial Musings or Meditations (or the like)—of Columbia.”¹² Lanier thanked him for this idea and happily adopted it. With all matters regarding the text smoothed and settled, Buck proceeded with his monumental task—setting the challenging poem to music and scoring it for performance by a 150-piece orchestra and a chorus of 800. He was aided in this by Lanier's suggestive annotations in the margins of the text; the opening chorus should be written with “sober, measured and yet majestic progressions of chords” and a “quartette” section should be in “a meagre and despairing minor.”¹³

Both Buck and Lanier were excited by the project and were optimistic of its success at the exhibition's opening ceremonies in May. However, it was not Lanier's fate to have even one undisturbed success. Against his strong objections, the text of the cantata was released to the press before the scheduled premiere. Lanier knew that the words were only part of a whole and could not be fairly judged without the music. Publication of the text without benefit of music made as much sense as publishing an opera libretto and calling it a poem. Lanier, Thomas, and Buck understood that the cantata had to be appreciated as the union of artistic purpose it was designed to be—the cumulative creation of poet, composer, conductor, chorus, and orchestra.

But New York Tribune music critic J. R. G. Hassard did not understand this, and on 31 March he opened the barrage of criticism that Lanier feared pre-performance publication would start. Hassard received a piano-vocal score of the cantata from its publisher, G. Schirmer of New York; he praised the music but called Lanier's text “sometimes obscure” and found at least one passage a “tough morsel.”¹⁴ Bayard Taylor, after speaking with Hassard, was reassured that no malice was meant toward Lanier and tried to calm the poet. But Lanier, knowing that “many of the people who will read this Tribune attack are not only incapable of judging its correctness but will be prevented from seeing the whole poem for yet six weeks,”¹⁵ framed a letter of defense. Taylor, ever the voice of moderation, urged him not to send it.

This was the beginning of a bitter time for Lanier, though friends like Buck and Taylor defended him ardently. Buck wrote that the “pitfalls”—using Hassard's word—which the poetry presented to the composer “were rather godsends.”¹⁶ Taylor spoke to fellow clubman Whitelaw Reid, editor of the Tribune, and arranged to have the full text of the cantata published in the paper, with “an appropriate and explanatory introduction” written by Taylor himself. In it, he would do his best to “set other papers upon the track of a right understanding.”¹⁷ The poem, with Taylor's introduction, was printed on 12 April. Lanier's work, noted Taylor, had “greater freedom and freshness” than that written by Tennyson for the International Exhibition in London.

Nonetheless, the attacks continued. In its 13 April issue, the Nation claimed that Lanier's poem was perhaps “suitable to a commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, as it is a practical assertion of emancipation from the ordinary laws of sense and sound, melody and prosody. … But that the music is already composed for it, we should hope it was not too late to save American letters from the humiliation of presenting to the world such a farrago as this as their choicest product.”¹⁸

Southern newspapers, as well as those of Baltimore and Philadelphia, rallied to defend Lanier against invectives such as this. The Baltimore Bulletin printed the poem, and its critic (possibly Lanier's friend, writer Innes Randolph) stated that the poetry for a cantata “must lie on the borderland between thought and melody; and it is in that region that Mr. Lanier is most happy and at home … himself a musician, and keenly alive to musical ‘motives’ as well as poetic thoughts.”¹⁹

It was unfortunate that the cantata, a symbol of reconciliation, was itself becoming a controversy with regional overtones. But it was hoped that the actual performance would win approval during the jubilation of the opening ceremonies. Surely Lanier would be vindicated then.

The morning of 10 May 1876 promised rain, but a quarter of a million people ignored the skies, determined to attend the opening of the American Centennial Exhibition. The crowd that awaited the beginning of the ceremonies at ten o'clock was so huge, wrote a reporter for the New York Times, that he could not even compute it; the crowd “was simply enormous and fainting men were dragged out by the Police by the dozens.”²⁰ A contemporary engraving depicting the scene at the plaza area shows every bit of space—in front of the reviewing stand and the musicians' platforms, around the flagpoles and equestrian statues—packed with spectators, many carrying umbrellas.

When the American flag atop the main building was unfurled, wrote an observer, “every other flag was opened to the breeze, the chimes began a joyful peal, and the grand Hallelujah chorus of Handel, performed by one thousand singers, and full orchestral and organ accompaniment, gave fitting expression to the popular joy.”²¹ As the orchestra, led by Theodore Thomas, played various national anthems, thousands passed through the gates and massed before the reviewing stands where dignitaries including President Ulysses S. Grant and Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, were assembled. The program began with the Centennial Inauguration March by Richard Wagner; whereas the commission of this work indicates the level of popularity Wagner had reached in America by 1876, this piece was one of his most disappointing. The Centennial Hymn, with music by John Knowles Paine and words by John Greenleaf Whittier, followed. But “the conspicuous feature of all,”²² stated the Baltimore Sun, was the cantata. This work, reported the New York Times, “afforded [the] most satisfaction. … unquestionably the most successful effort of the day.”²³

The Centennial Meditation of Columbia was a triumph. Lanier sat proudly in the reviewing stand as Buck led the huge chorus and orchestra in the exciting performance. The influence of the work upon the massed audience, wrote the Times, was “more decisive than either the hymn or Wagner's march.” The solo passage of the “Good Angel,” sung by basso Myron Whitney of Boston, had to be repeated because “the enthusiasm of the auditors took the shape of a recall, and Mr. Buck had to appear and acknowledge a liberal tribute of applause.”²⁴ The Baltimore Sun wrote that Whitney's “lowest notes were like the tremulous vibration of an organ's pipes, causing the excited listeners … to exclaim ‘Superb!’ ‘Bravo!’ and to declare that it was the best thing of the hour.”²⁵

Unfortunately, no contemporary account records any special tribute paid to Lanier, but he was exhilarated nonetheless and wrote to his father: “I wish I had time to give you some idea how great it was; probably nothing like it has ever been beheld or heard.” The bass solo, he wrote, “was heard by at least twenty five thousand people, and was encored,—both of which circumstances are probably without parallel on an occasion of this kind.”²⁶ Lanier's comments were not the result of egotism but of joy at seeing his dream—musical poetry wedded to poetic music—fulfilled, and having its realization received with admiration and appreciation. This cantata was the culmination of a total aesthetic experience in which lyrics were not, as Lanier put it, “a rhymed set of good adages,” but were, with the music, mutually suggestive of the ideas presented; it was a pioneer effort in American artistic creation.

That evening Lanier and Buck attended a reception with President Grant and Dom Pedro, Lanier thoroughly enjoying the excitement of which he was a part. But his happiness was spoiled the next day—as many days and weeks would continue to be marred—by the continuation of criticism heaped upon his poetry. “Many of the papers,” he wrote sadly to Mary, “have renewed the most bitter abuse and ridicule upon my poor little Cantata, and have displayed an amount of gratuitous cruelty and ignorant brutality of which I could never have dreamed.”²⁷ To Lanier, who probably never had a malicious thought, who was rarely angry and always forgiving, this was crushing.

Despite the acclaim of the audience and the support of the Philadelphia and Baltimore newspapers, other critics, notably in New York, continued to disparage Lanier. There was one positive account in the New York Tribune—written by Bayard Taylor. “I wish some of the critics who were made so unhappy by Mr. Lanier's cantata could have heard it sung. … It was original in the perfection of the execution no less than in the conception of both poet and composer. The effect upon the audience could not be mistaken.”²⁸ And in an editorial in his Bulletin, Gibson Peacock stated that Lanier, “with all the stirring of original conception alive within him, could not dare to be anything on such an occasion that was not wholly true to his own genius, his own idea of art.”²⁹ The Philadelphia New Century For Women declared that the cantata was “the century itself, two centuries in its bosom. Those who have not heard it sung, have not begun to spell its meaning.”³⁰

Though these comments pleased Lanier, he was more affected by such as those appearing in the New York Herald: “Mr. Lanier … has written a beautiful poem, but it is obscure to the eye and must be unintelligible to the ear. … The argument of the poem is not easily to be comprehended, and the language is harsh.” An editorial in the New York Times called the cantata a “bewildering collection of rhymes … entirely at variance with the taste of the American people.”³¹ At least two parodies of Lanier's words also appeared. This was too much for Lanier's normally stoic nature. “How bitter,” he cried to Mary, “is the heedless hurt of this hoofed Stupidity which one cannot allow himself to hate!” Neither did he want the poem to be acclaimed by people simply because they admired him personally; he wanted them to understand the purpose of his art. But his friends, he said, “do not know what I am about, and the cheap triumph of wrong praise is but a pain to the Artist.”³² He decided to send his letter of explanation and defense to the New York Tribune, the one Bayard Taylor had urged him not to send.

The letter explained his philosophy of musical verse and the special problems of a poet writing words to be sung: sound had to express ideas just as effectively as words; only general conceptions could be depicted; the words had to be ones easily enunciated by the chorus; and sectional movements had to have clear delineations in sound. Lanier's thesis was that major changes had to be made “in the relations of Poetry to Music by the prodigious modern development of the orchestra.”³³ Revealing his familiarity with Schubert, Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Meyerbeer, and Rossini, he traced the progress of orchestral technique—and therefore complexity of structure in composition—in their musical expression. But he was chiefly impressed by Wagner's ability to express intellectual conceptions through the use of instrumentation, and this admiration for Wagner's manipulation of musical textures is ultimately reflected in Lanier's own manipulation of verbal texture. The essay is a cogent explanation of the effects of programme music upon Lanier's poetry and how his poetry was constructed with musical principles in mind.

However, this letter had no effect upon those who had desired merely a pretty poem for their centennial. It did serve to continue the controversy. And, unfortunately, it finally exposed Lanier's long-repressed anger, anger at the “endeavor of certain newspapers to belittle the largest anniversary's celebration of our country by the treatment of one of its constituent features” without any attempt to understand it, and the display of “inexcusable disregard for the proprieties of a dignified occasion and for the laws of respectable behavior.”³⁴

Dwight's Journal of Music, as the chief monitor of American musical life, had been following the conflict closely. In its issue of 27 May 1876, it reprinted the text of the cantata (as well as that of Whittier's hymn), followed by a reprint of Lanier's letter to the Tribune on 10 June. Two weeks later the journal printed an unsigned article entitled “A New Sydney's ‘Defense’ of a New Kind ‘of Poesy.’” The author of this article called the Centennial cantata the “strangest and the last result of Wagnerism! … [Lanier], who is also a musician, member of an orchestra of ultra-modern tendencies—has eaten of the insane root, and has become intensely Wagnerized.” Stating that he too understood that poetry and music could be wed, the critic believed that had already been accomplished best by Bach in his cantatas. But Wagner had changed all this, stressing drama and orchestral expression, so that the voice “simply interprets, calls the names, points with a stick … we should hardly miss the singing.” And Lanier's cantata, following “this modern striving after novelty,” suffered a loss in clarity. Interestingly, the author of this critique does not so much discredit Lanier, whose “The Symphony” he admired and whose general purposes he understood. The villain of the whole drama, according to the critic, was Wagner, for the “stupendous overshadowing modern orchestra, with the vast revolutionary Wagner phantom behind it, has disturbed Lanier's poetic spontaneity and spoiled his poem. … a theoretic bugbear intervened to make the verbal expression purposely obscure.”³⁵ The development of modern music and of the orchestra, which Lanier credited as an aid to the development of his poetry, was labeled here a corrupting influence.

Two weeks later, continuing to monitor the controversy, Dwight's carried yet another article, reprinted from the July issue of the Atlantic Monthly—never any friend to Lanier and certainly not one now. The Atlantic's critic, W. F. Apthorp, found that “Mr. Buck has been unfortunate in the text to which he has written music.” Lanier's poem, the article stated, might be “suitable to musical treatment in the dramatic, declamatory Liszt-Wagner style, but is very ill adapted to musical treatment in the purely musical style in which Mr. Buck is so gracefully at home.” Apparently the Atlantic wished composers to be as genteel as the writers of whom it approved, for it found Buck's work so “capital,” and “so pure and unforced,” that it could “overlook an occasional tendency to the trivial and commonplace.” It could forgive Buck's conservatism—for, in truth, he was no pioneer of creativity—but not Lanier's innovation. Lanier, “in expounding the alphabet of a new poetic-musical art … has forgotten that it must have a grammar also.”³⁶

It is sad that, whereas Lanier did enjoy acclaim as the honored Centennial poet, so many writers and publications saw fit to tear him limb from limb for his efforts. Yet there are grounds for many legitimate and unprejudiced criticisms. Buck's music was more easily comprehended in 1876 than was Lanier's poetry, and therefore was dealt with gently at the time—but it cannot be spared from an examination that finds it less than satisfactory. If the Centennial Meditation of Columbia is not an entirely gratifying work, it is because of a certain awkwardness in both poetry and music.

Those critics who lambasted Lanier's poem could not understand his concept of depicting the various forces molding the American nation as contrasting “broad bands” of sound. Some contemporary commentators, however, such as the reporter for the New Century For Women, did comprehend and endeavored to impress their appreciation upon their readers. The reporter for the New York Times who attended the ceremonies understood; while he criticized the music, he found in it those qualities which proved how well Buck had attempted to adhere to Lanier's ideals. “The merits of the score are perhaps somewhat unequal, and the themes are not always of marked excellence, but the cantata is full of variety of rhythm and tempo, and replete with contrast.”³⁷ Another defense of Lanier came from C. B. Taylor, author of an 1876 history of the United States, the narrative of which culminates in a description of the centennial exhibition. He noted that “in reading the lines we must remember the musical restrictions under which Mr. Lanier was held. Within the compass of sixty lines he was obliged to make direct reference to the changes, contrasts, and combinations of voices and instruments. None but a musician as well as a poet could have done this, and it was Mr. Lanier's proficiency in both arts which enabled him to attain his present success.”³⁸

In many ways the Centennial Meditation of Columbia resembles “The Symphony,” for similar ideas and vehicles are used. The cantata is divided into several distinct sections, and the controlling sense-image is sound—it is the history of the United States in timbre and tone. Accordingly, Buck had to complement each section with its own appropriate musical setting, but still provide unity so the piece would not have a choppy effect. This was no simple task, especially considering what Buck called “this miserable writing against time.” Although both poet and composer worked valiantly, the results, to some extent, prove that creativity could be inspired, but not upon demand.

In the cantata, Columbia, seated upon her vantage point of a “hundred-terraced height,” reflects upon her past and listened as “old voices rise and call” from her history. Buck attempted to give the “voices”—those of early settlers, the elements of nature they fought, the sounds of war—individual characterizations, but he achieved only partial success. As much in agreement with each other as Lanier and Buck may have been, they were not totally well suited.

The basic problem stemmed from Lanier being an unconventional poet—though many of his works are in traditional form, his more ambitious works belong to what was then the avant-garde—and Buck being a conventional composer whose creations never became the subject of public debate. Buck, as Gilbert Chase notes, “wrote for the taste of the day and for a ready market.”³⁹ He was a European-trained American composer of the imitative school, which is evident in the cantata. At times the music is like that of a traditional hymn, while other sections have echoes of Beethoven and Verdi; whereas a variety of stylistic expression might have been what Lanier wanted, the aesthetic results, musically, are less than outstanding because they contain nothing unique, and very little of the music is memorable. The Atlantic Monthly was correct in saying that “Mr. Buck does not write with a very Titanic pen,”⁴⁰ but it found less fault with his musical understatement than with Lanier's more daring efforts. The “merely general” in music was more acceptable to a conservative audience than generalized concepts expressed in verse.

While sympathetic to Lanier's ideas, Buck was simply not predisposed to writing music much different from his previous works or from other popular works in the current mode; his training negated it. The writer for Dwight's Journal of Music saw this, realizing that although Buck's music “is perfectly clear as music (and very clever too in many parts) … it does not help at all to make the enigmatical lines of the poem any clearer. No, this music quietly takes them on its back and flows on at ‘its own sweet will,’ unconscious of the burden.” The author remarks that, given lines such as:

Yonder where the to-and-fro
Weltering of my Long-Ago
Moves about the moveless base
Far below my resting place

(ll. 7-10)

Buck makes “no particular ado” in setting them to music. Here was “a chance to ‘welter,’ too, after the approved Wagner fashion; but our composer, bound before all things to write musically and clearly, is not tempted.”⁴¹ Most likely this was meant as praise, faint as it may sound, but with a tone of subtle irony that hints of disapproval of Buck's lack of adventurousness. But how could Buck have written otherwise? He had an established mode of composition; his traditional, conventional music could not have been an equal partner to experimental verse. Therefore, the four lines quoted above, rather than rolling and surging as the words suggest, are delivered in the lovely but predictable harmonies of a hymn. Lanier had asked that this first section be given “sober, measured and yet majestic progressions of chords,”⁴² and this is just what Buck provided, in the only mode he knew.

As long as Lanier's words remained on a concrete level, Buck had little trouble working with them. The second section, depicting the Mayflower “Trembling westward o'er yon balking sea” (l. 12), with the sighs of the Pilgrims in conflict with the shouting of “Gray-lipp'd waves” (l. 15), is provided with effective, if rather trite, “storm music.” But when Lanier moves to the abstract level, difficulties begin for both composer and audience. Here it is possible to understand the criticism that Lanier's poem was vague:

Then old Shapes and Masks of Things,
Framed like Faiths or clothed like Kings—
Ghosts of Goods once fleshed and fair,
Grown foul Bads in alien air—

(ll. 23-26)

These lines introduce the theme of war, an idea not difficult to render through music. However, the more abstract concepts were much more problematic to communicate. The combination of this difficulty and the realization that these lines are far from Lanier's best validates some of the criticism. There are also others that would prompt negative criticism: “Toil through the stertorous death of the Night” (l. 41), or “Jamestown, out of thee— / Plymouth, thee—thee, Albany” (ll. 17-18). And any reader familiar with poems that described things exactly, or with identifiable imagery, would certainly stop at “Yonder where the to-and-fro / Weltering of my Long-Ago” and would wonder how a “Long-Ago” weltered.

There are lines and sections, however, where Lanier is majestic, and although Buck tries to meet him, he falls short. Lanier may have had the “immortal melodies of Beethoven” in mind while he wrote his words, but unfortunately he was not working with a Beethoven. When Lanier's words are bad, Buck's music is mediocre; when Lanier's words are excellent, Buck's music is merely good.

The finest part of the cantata comes at the end, when Columbia declares in triumph—“Despite the land, despite the sea, / I was: I am: and I shall be” (ll. 46-47)—but wishes the “Good Angel” to tell her how long the republic can expect to last. The answer—the basso solo encored by the audience—contains six conditions which, if met, will ensure the permanence of America. These few lines are masterpieces of richness, terse and yet full:

“Long as thine Art shall love true love,
Long as thy Science truth shall know,
Long as thine Eagle harms no Dove,
Long as thy Law by law shall grow,
Long as thy God is God above,
Thy brother every man below,
So long, dear Land of all my love,
Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow!”

(ll. 50-57)

This is the closest that Lanier comes to writing a “rhymed set of good adages.” But here this parallel set of simple and straightforward maxims, easy to deliver and to comprehend, is most appropriate.

In the final chorus, music is proclaimed to be the herald of a harmonious future:

O Music, from this height of time my Word unfold:
In thy large signals all men's hearts thy Heart behold

(ll. 58-59)

These lines are given the majestic, hymn-like theme of the opening of the cantata, but unfortunately the next couplet, the concluding lines, is rendered virtually indistinguishable. The composer, self-consciously aware that he was writing a Buck cantata, decided to introduce a great fugue. Fugal singing renders the words difficult to understand under the best of conditions, and outdoor delivery by a chorus of eight hundred must have been thunderously chaotic. A fugue was certainly not the easiest method of presenting these lines of, as Lanier annotated them, “jubilation and welcome”:

Mid-heaven unroll thy chords as friendly flags unfurled,
And wave the world's best lover's welcome to the world.

The controversy over the centennial cantata lasted long after its concluding brass and percussion fanfares had died away. But being controversial was preferable to being unknown. Lanier's words were read by tens of thousands who never heard Buck's music. The cantata was performed again in the fall of 1876 at Theodore Thomas's Centennial Musical Festival, and then the music was packed off to obscurity. Today, Lanier's poem can be found in his collected works in any major library, but the piano-vocal score published by Schirmer is a rarity; Dudley Buck's original score and orchestral parts remain in manuscript, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

The opening day of the Centennial Exhibition was, for Sidney Lanier, a day of celebration and a time for putting to public test his idea of musical-poetic unity. In some ways his efforts were still rough and tentative, but judging from the cheers of the three hundred thousand people who heard the cantata performed, he was a success. And from the turmoil generated by his words, it was evident that Lanier was a literary figure who could not be ignored.

Notes

1. William Peirce Randel, Centennial: American Life in 1876 (New York: Chilton, 1969) 286-87.

2. Sidney Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 9 January 1876, in The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson et al., 10 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1945) 9:295 (hereafter cited as CE).

3. Dudley Buck to Sidney Lanier, 5 January 1876, quoted in ibid., 299 n. 17.

4. Lanier, “To Mary Day Lanier,” 8 January 1876, ibid., 294.

5. Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 12 January 1876, ibid., 296.

6. Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 13 January 1876, ibid., 296-97.

7. Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 15 January 1876, ibid., 298.

8. Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 13 January 1876, ibid., 296.

9. Dudley Buck to Sidney Lanier, 5 January 1876, ibid., 299 n. 17.

10. Gilbert Chase, America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, rev. 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 334-35; CE, 9:292-93 n.5.

11. Lanier, “To Mary Day Lanier,” 22 January 1876, CE, 9:305.

12. Dudley Buck to Sidney Lanier, 30 January 1876, ibid., 312 n.33.

13. The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, CE, 1:60-62.

14. Aubrey Harrison Starke, Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study (reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1964) 240.

15. Lanier, “To Bayard Taylor,” 1 April 1876, CE, 9:349.

16. Dudley Buck to Sidney Lanier, 4 April 1876, quoted in ibid., 354-55 n.83.

17. Bayard Taylor to Sidney Lanier, 11 April 1876, quoted in ibid., 355 n.85.

18. Quoted in ibid., 360 n.89.

19. Baltimore Bulletin, 15 April 1876, quoted in ibid., 361 n.89.

20. New York Times, 11 May 1876, 1.

21. C. B. Taylor, One Hundred Years' Achievements of a Free People (New York: Henry S. Allen, 1876) 718.

22. Baltimore Sun, 11 May 1876, 1.

23. New York Times, 11 May 1876, 1.

24. Ibid., 2.

25. Baltimore Sun, 11 May 1876, 1.

26. Lanier, “To Robert S. Lanier,” 12 May 1876, CE, 9:363.

27. Lanier, “To Mary Day Lanier,” 2 June 1876, ibid., 364.

28. Quoted in ibid., 363 n.91.

29. Quoted in ibid., 366 n.97.

30. Ibid.

31. Quoted in ibid., 364 n.94.

32. Lanier, “To Mary Day Lanier,” 15 May 1876, ibid., 365-66.

33. “The Centennial Cantata,” CE, 2:266.

34. Ibid., 273.

35. Dwight's Journal of Music (24 June 1876): 255.

36. “The Centennial Cantata,” Dwight's Journal of Music (8 July 1876): 261.

37. New York Times, 11 May 1876, 1.

38. Taylor, One Hundred Years' Achievements, 723.

39. Chase, America's Music, 335.

40. Dwight's Journal of Music (8 July 1876): 261.

41. “A New Sydney's ‘Defense’ of a New Kind ‘of Poesy,’” Dwight's Journal of Music (24 June 1876): 255.

42. Marginal annotation to lines 1-10, CE, 2:60.